Every single character I get has terrible attributes and they only ever get worse. The longest I managed to go between bad promotions was seventeen minutes. I timed it. That was the amount of time between my one scientist becoming a foreign spy and my best spy becoming an alcoholic.

Fought off a pirate raid? troop general is now a bad attacker.

Made contact with another empire? your ambassador now eats babies.

Did someone forget to add a decimal place somewhere? maybe? like it should be a 9.0% chance to get a negative attribute but instead it's 90%. It's utterly insane.

Human, running the way of the ancients government. There was one system all alone in the middle of the map and I knew there'd be something there. Turns out it was the archive.

Got a fairly good reputation from pirates slamming face first into my fleets in a truly bizzare campaign against one single mining station that produces lead. Dozens of ships have burned trying to blow up that mining station.

Interesting. I have not played the game much. Owned the original for years but never got into. Just the other day bought all the updates and have been playing it a bit: Shadows 1.9.06 I think it is. I've restarted a couple of times to get a feel for it, but hopefully my next restart will be a play through till the end.

So far I have only played humans, 1400 (15x15) galaxy with about 7 rival species, slow tech, pre-warp start. I started once with Democracy and played about 20 years. Started once as Corporate Nationalism and played about 7 years (just up to warp travel). Characters were not in the vanilla game so that is the extent of my experience with them.

Just based on that, I cannot say that I've had quite the bad luck you have had. It does seem to be true that characters generally have at least one negative trait (after all, who doesn't!?), but not quite as extreme as you describe.

Assuming you are playing with the most up-to-date version of Shadows, maybe it is your settings? Or, maybe you're just having bad luck combined with a tad bit of exaggeration??

I've noticed bad traits turn up too regularly. The most annoying one I find is every time I end a war one of my admirals becomes a drunk. I've also noticed negative traits seem to turn up far too much on spawned characters, most noticeably "weak" intelligence agents. It's possible that the positive and the negative are about 50/50, but given that characters are meant to be a good thing to have you would think the negative traits should really be rare. When your spawning spies that are no good at anything and have a negative counter espionage skill, you really have to wonder if that is really the best the billions of people in your population has to offer?

It's not the biggest issue in the game, but if I was tweaking the code I would certainly make negative trait occurrence rarer than it is now.

I think it's the difficulty setting. If you're on Extreme, or somewhere near, I think the chances for poor skills/traits increases a lot. As I hear, in Shadows they've tweaked the difficulty real good so that it now affects almost everything in the game rather than just giving income bonuses and whatnot to the other factions.

I'm playing on normal since I wanted to get used to the game with the pirates. (Only just snagged the latest Xpack).

I'm really not exaggerating about this. Both my spies started with xenophobic. The first promotion one of them got was lawful! It's got to the point where I set autosave every five minutes and the moment I see 'character' has been promoted I just load the last save.

I agree with the above. Every time I succeed at something my characters become worse not better. I don't understand why there are any negative traits. These are my best of the best where best of the best obviously means drunken, weak, corrupt individuals who drag down everything they touch. If I want people like that running my empire I'll go hire some of the politicians in real life.

The one time I got a good run of traits on my leader they were overthrown and replaced with the most useless individual in my entire collection of characters. No matter how many times I reloaded they still got the chop.

Please oh please () let me turn on or off negative traits as a part of the difficulty setting. One little check box :)

Did you start under the .10 release? In my last game I've found that I've had to fire more characters out the space lock than in all my other games combined due to bad traits. And my ownership goes back to original release and year.

Okay, I've now noticed my first bad trait character too. Within less than a year I got a scientist with Foreign Spy. Anyway I can kill or arrest him or something? I guess the easiest thing is to put him in a cheap escort ship and send him to attack a pilot enclave?

Anthropoid: There's a dismiss button on the top of the character screen just above the portrait.

dazoline II: Yeah, I'm patched up and running the latest version and you are right. It was never this bad in any of the previous games I ran through, at all. Bad traits were something that actually surprised you when they popped up back then, not the norm like now.

I haven't had such bad experiences to be honest. I actually love the system. It's balanced, so you don't get overpowered just through characters and they get a sense of personality to them. Maybe you just got an unlucky streak. Try another game and see if your luck changes.

The issue is that this isn't just one game it is constant. The run of poor traits just goes on and on to the point I feel like I wish I didn't have any special characters as it becomes too frustrating to deal with them. There are a lot of ways to stop characters from becoming over powerful, endless negative traits is not a good one. As I said earlier, a simple checkbox which allows those who like to have special characters not be obnoxious drunk weak leaders to turn of negative traits and would solve the issue. It gives the player a choice about how they want it to be

King Doom, you may want to try being ruthless in dismissing characters that have weak bonuses or negative traits that directly impact their desired performance. This allows room for respawning characters as Elliot mentioned there is a cap depending on empire size/strength. If you can, in combination build the Academies for characters of most interest to encourage them to appear (and once you have a full complement get rid of them)

My approach is:

1. I see most Ship Captains, Fleet Admirals and Troop Generals as low value so I dismiss them immediately unless they are awesome. I would prefer any spare room in allowed characters to be used elsewhere.

2. I like lots of Scientists so I build Science Academies to encourage them to respawn. If a negative trait emerges on spawn I dismiss, plenty more will follow.

3. With Leaders I've had similar cases where multiple leaders have negative traits. As soon as the game allows ... dismiss. If the next leader is rubbish do the same. I really like this in the game after all there is no shortage of negative traits in most politicians.

I tend to struggle with Colony Governors. In playing Quameno they don't often spawn so a negative trait is tough to deal with. However, I see this as a consequence of my choice to play that race.

If you adapt this for your playstyle perhaps it might help.

Note also I tend to play games on Expensive Research so there is time for good new characters to emerge.

After all, as he points out, negative traits seem to be an infinite resource among real life politicians.

This is completely anecdotal but, it almost seems like player actions can provoke negative traits to some extent. For example, raise taxes = cause a corrupt leader. Change to a less free govt = cause a foreign spy, etc.